Excellent customer service is the number one job in any company! It is the personality of the company and the reason customers come back. Without customers, there is no company!
Dealing with customers is not something that you can take for granted. Especially when it comes to post-sales customer support; plus, if your customer support is based on manual emails, you might face many issues. A simple email-based manual customer support comes with its set of downfalls. The clutter of emails from all your customers leaves your agents scrambling to figure out which ones require more attention and which ones require immediate actions.
Manual systems have no place for measuring progress. You cannot keep track of your previous interactions with the customer. There is no method through which you can save the customer data safely. Email ticketing systems negate all these downfalls and help organizations build a straightforward approach to customer queries.
Email ticketing systems are a great invention! They are simple, easy-to-use, cost-effective, and helps you perform efficiently. They are a great help to your customer support department. It also helps your customers with issues, questions, or any other kind of need for communication. Let’s check out and find out how it works. Here’s what we are going to discuss:
Email Ticketing System: How Does it Work?
Usually, complaints are registered in the form of emails. You receive an email, register the complaint, resolve the issue, and write back to the customer. If the issue takes longer, you have to inform that as well to the customer. Quite an effort, huh? Besides, if you don’t have an integrated helpdesk system, the work increases more.
An email ticketing system cuts this path and makes everything work from where it should, i.e., the email inbox. All the queries get registered through email. These emails are converted into tickets, and the acknowledgment notifications are sent automatically.
Advantages of an Email Ticketing System
There are so many advantages of using an email ticketing system. Let’s take a look at some:
I. Boosts the Overall Productivity
Switching between various tools makes your agents more tired and less productive. This results in an average agent spending more hours per week on emails. But, email ticketing systems are collaborative. You can perform each and every task from the same place. The overall efficiency and productivity of the work and processes are improved.
II. Improves In-team Collaboration
Collaboration changes everything. An email ticketing system allows your team to collaborate. How? By using shared inboxes! A shared inbox creates transparency in the workflow. This is applicable both for managers and agents. This way, everyone can be on the same page, including agents, managers, and the team.
Collaboration makes the response quicker for tickets that require different types of expertise. As a result, your response time would drop drastically. This eventually leads to more satisfied customers.
III. Gives a Transparent and Efficient Workflow
Transparent workflow is an essential part of teamwork. When everyone knows what the other team members are doing, the work gets better. This applies to both the agents and the manager. Transparent workflow is also essential because:
- Your agents know what they are working on.
- They also know what they’ll be working on next.
- They can set up weekly or monthly goals.
- If someone else is dealing with or is stuck with a problem and need help, the manager can easily find out where they’re stuck and who can help.
- Priorities are defined, and this helps agents plan their schedules accordingly.
- Agents can avoid potential collisions.
IV. Gradually Reduces Errors
Manual systems call for tons of flaws in the customer support workflow. It is hard to ensure that everything is on time and in place with manual or spreadsheet-based customer support. Notes can get lost, and there is always a data security issue.
With an email ticketing system, you can collect all essential information and ensure its security as well. The system ensures that the deadline is followed automatically and the customers receive day-to-day updates regarding their queries.
V. Centralization Makes it all Work for the Best
Centralization changes everything! Whether it is related to transparency, collaboration, or productivity itself. Centralization is an important aspect that we considered while developing the DeskXpand email ticketing system. The idea was to allow people to make the most of their work from a single interface. We’re sure it will change your support game.
Why Should an Organization Invest in an Email Ticketing System
If you’re thinking about investing in an email ticketing system, you’d probably have a question about whether the cost of investment will pay off or not. Calculating the return on investment of a new tool can be tricky. You might have questions like, “what impact will it have on the revenue?”, “will it decrease the cost of business?”, “will it be cheaper than your previous manual customer support?”
These are the most perplexing questions for businesses, customer support managers, and teams. Measuring the impact of your actions has always been difficult. This could be because customer support is still seen as a “cost center” rather than a revenue generator.
But, in the post-pandemic world, the scenario is changing. Companies have realized how badly they need a digital system in place to provide an utterly touchless experience. Ergo, this is the correct time to invest in an email ticketing system.
But the key is to make the right choice and select the right system for your business. When you serve an exceptional customer experience as a part of your product’s offerings, it eventually drives revenue. But, all this is only possible with the right features. So, while choosing an email ticketing system for your business, you need to be utterly careful about your business needs. Following are some of the essential features of an email ticketing system:
What Should You Look For in an Email Ticketing System?
An email ticketing system is a way to make sure all your tickets get enough attention on time. While choosing an email ticketing system, these are the features that you should consider:
1. Convert Your Emails to Tickets
An ideal email ticketing system lets you set up email forwarding rules. These rules are to make sure that all the customer emails get automatically converted into tickets. You also need features where you can auto-cc every response sent to your email. This also ensures that you have a copy of the response handy whenever required.
An automation feature is required because it eliminates the need for manual query registration. This way, no queries can slip through the crack. Plus, once the query is registered, your system can trigger an automated acknowledgment response. It also helps you unify all the data in a single place that agents can access securely.
2. Immediate Ticket Assignment
It could be a hugely time-consuming task to sort through a pile of tickets and assign them each manually. Deciding priorities and resources manually can also be a pickle. This can also lead to tickets going unassigned. An email ticketing system can help you automate this process, helping you save time and ensure fast and accurate responses.
Plus, it gives all the controls in the hands of the support manager. The managers can set up various rules based on service level agreements and according to the agent’s expertise. They can apply their methods of ticket prioritization. This also prevents agents from cherry-picking the tickets.
Managers can assign tickets based on two methods:
2.1 Round Robin
This method is the simplest form of automatic ticket assignment. It distributes the tickets evenly between all the available agents. This way, you can also manage if any of the agents are not present or on leave.
2.2 Assignment Based on Various Parameters
This method is popular amongst companies as it ensures that the ticket goes to the most suitable agent on the team. For example, you can set up a parameter that all the queries coming from social media are assigned to a specific agent.
3. Auto-Identify Existing Tickets
Autoidentifiers can be used to avoid redundant tickets. For every incoming ticket, your ticketing system should be able to identify if the email thread is a reply to an existing ticket or not. If it is not a thread to an existing ticket, then the system should generate.
4. Automatic Answer Suggestions
Your support agents might receive multiple common queries on an everyday basis. Typing out these answers each time slows down the process of your entire team. An email ticketing system like DeskXpand pulls in relevant articles from your knowledge base for common queries.
This way, agents do not have to repeat answering the same queries again and again. All they need to do is hit send if the suggestions are accurate.
5. Email Templates and Canned Responses to Save Time
With DeskXpand, agents can use templates to reduce the time spent on typing repetitive content. You can save templates based on the kind of common queries you receive. With the help of email templates, agents can respond to the customers much faster and reduce the manual effort required with each ticket. Email templates can also help you send personalized responses while writing back to your customers.
Canned Responses
It refers to ready-made (pre-formatted and pre-saved) responses that can be used to reduce your customer support response time and serve consistent support to your customers. It usually includes common greeting messages or common responses for future use.
It saves the support agents from typing repetitive answers time and again. This also reduces typos and helps the customer support agents disperse stress.
DeskXpand, an email ticketing system, provides built-in and extensive ticketing functionalities to empower organizations and their support departments. It comes with extensive features like automatic ticket import, assignment, email templates, canned responses, auto-identifiers, and so on. I’m sure you’d like to take a look. Take a demo now!
6. Chats Within the Ticket
The most significant benefit of using an email ticketing system is that it simplifies support at the agent’s end. Take this feature, for example: chat within the ticket. Sounds mainstream, right? But only a support agent can tell you how much unnecessary communication they get to avoid because of this simple feature.
Once you enable your agents to chat within the ticket, everything they do is logged on the system. Even if they want to escalate the issue to senior authorities, they can do it within the ticketing system. It saves a lot of redundant communication.
7. Reclaiming Deflections
Reclaiming deflections refers to managing a sudden spike in the number of incoming queries on a particular channel. Agents can do this by routing it to the available agents. For example, on a particular week after your company offered a considerable sale, your social media tickets are raising like never before. As a support manager, you should be able to redistribute these tickets and assign them to the available agents. An ideal email ticketing system would allow you to do this seamlessly.
8. Unified Dashboard
A unified dashboard is another common feature that an email ticketing system should have. A unified dashboard allows the admins or the support managers to monitor everything from a single place. They can see all the agents and their work from a single place.
DeskXpand Dashboard
This enables admins to provide quick support if an agent is stuck somewhere or has a problem in the workflow. This dashboard must also include reporting and analytics features. The support managers must be able to see everything from the same place.
9. Autoresponders
Sometimes, customers only need to know that their queries have been registered successfully. If the customers do not hear from you within 24 hours of registering a complaint, a negative sentiment appears. This affects your long-term relationship with the customer. This is where auto-responders come into the picture.
A study says, less than 10% of companies use autoresponders. You can use it to notify your customers that you’ve received their queries. Through automated email notifications, you can keep your customers involved through every step of the resolution journey.
10. Quantifiable Feedback
The customer support cycle only ends when your agents receive the customer’s feedback. Without an email ticketing system, it isn’t easy to quantify customer satisfaction. With DeskXpand, agents can attach a feedback widget to their replies, enabling customers to rate their experience.
Managers can comprehensively measure these ratings. It can be based on individual agents or a broader level as well. This also helps agents understand the areas they’re strong in and the areas they need to improve.
11. Analytics and Reporting
Top email ticketing systems don’t stop at helping the queries meet resolution. Analyzing your workflow to find roadblocks and trends is essential too.
By leveraging the best email ticketing system, you can pinpoint unique relationships between queries and find the most trending queries. Later you can add the solutions to these queries to your knowledge base articles. Through your email ticketing system, you can find out the strategies you benefit from and those that need scrapping. You can evaluate the productivity of your entire support through email ticketing system analytics.
An Ideal Email Ticketing System for Businesses
Regardless of your organization and industry niche, your company will need an email ticketing system or any other dedicated software to manage customer support. Keep in mind that the most important thing is to keep the customers happy and resolve their issues soon. It is also important that your agents do not feel burnt out and can do their work seamlessly. If the agents are happy, the customers’ issues are solved, and hence the customers are happy!
Hence, do not settle for manual or inefficient software. Take some time to think about it, and do not settle for anything less than your needs. DeskXpand is an email ticketing system that turns your emails into support tickets and gives your team a unified workspace to collaborate. It provides a single space to support customers, manage agents and their tasks, resolve and close queries once the resolution is met.
DeskXpand, an email ticketing system, is built by functional experts and developers with certifications in their respective fields. We are an ISO27001 certified email ticketing system development company trusted by users worldwide for 14+ years now. So, are you ready to take a demo?
The Article is Originally Published On:
https://www.deskxpand.com/blog/email-ticketing-system-wiki-guide/
